Musings on Fritz Leiber

Leiber was apparently very sensitive and introverted growing up, and had a father who was a superstar Shakespearean actor known around the world. His father was also extremely competitive, and as intellecutal as his son. When little Fritz jr learned to play chess, so did dear old dad. When Fritz jr started writing, so did dad. And, according to what Fritz jr's son Justin has written, the dad would keep pushing and prying and try to outdo the son. As can be learned from the title of one of his autobiographical pieces (Not Much Disorder and Not so Early Sex) Leiber jr wasn't exactly a lady's man, and as I think I understand it his mother sort of doted on him and took care of him. He didn't really approach females until he was away at college, but rather would observe them, and sometimes worship them, from a distance. Perhaps that's why he took so strongly to Robert Graves' conception of the White Goddess—the eternal Muse, the artist's animating force and the goddesslike inner feminine inside of a man. Perhaps it was his early way of conceiving of what he would later understand in Jungian terms as the Anima. If a man desires women too much or fears them too much, it's really his own inner Anima he's in some wrong relation to, and he'll project it out onto real women, or onto features of the Earth or sky as goddesslike figures. If you feel a need to connect more strongly with your anima but are unable to, you might desire flesh-and-blood women too much, seeing them as something you need in order to complete yourself. This can lead to sexual or romantic obsessions. If your perceived need (more properly I suppose your inability to relate properly to the anima) is strong enough, it projects itself out onto the sky or the night or the universe as a goddess, either benevolent or frightening, depending on your relation to her.

This is what's always been called The White Goddess, the Mother of Creation and Destruction, the Great Mother and the Terrible Mother, etc. Religions are born of these kinds of projections, which is the origin of figures like Lillith, Kali, Hera, Aphrodite, Freya and Frigg, and on and on. When we were not fully formed yet as rational conscious beings, we existed mostly in the full sway of the unconscious, meaning we were unable to tell dream from reality, and we saw everything in very dreamlike ways. Gods, goddesses, mythological figures, monsters, titans and frost giants—these things were every bit as real to us as trees, snakes, stalks of wheat, and leaves of grass. And really they are just as real, but they exist in the sacred realm, the magical land, the underworld—aka the unconscious. They're archetypes of the collective unconscious. There are male figures as well of course, it's just that I'm concentrating on the feminine for this post. If a man sees a real, flesh-and-blood woman as in some way either divine or terrifying, he's projecting his anima onto her. Apprently Fritz Leiber jr did this. Ok, all men do, and all women project their animus onto men (at least at times). Very few people are so psychologically mature and balanced that they don't project. We have a Shadow too, that we also project. It isn't concerned with the opposite sex, but with the things about yourself you're embarrassed about or afraid of or ashamed of, that seem to be of your own sex. Shadow figures will appear to be male (for a man, female for a woman), or they might appear as animals or monsters. Always something mysterious, frightening or oppositional. Something to struggle against, to defeat or be defeated by. This is just to quickly lay the groundwork. I wrote in more detail about the Anima and the Shadow and other archetypes here:

• Introduction to Shadow Work

At some point during his Gravesian period Leiber became aware of Jung and immediately took to the theories. Here was a psychological explanation of the phenomenon of The White Goddess and witches, and why women are so powerful, desirable or terrifying at times.

Harry Otto Fischer (the Mouser) wanted to be a writer before Leiber did

I hope I'm understanding this right. During those long letters back and forth from Kentucky to New Jersey, when Fischer first conceived of strutting Mouser and tall Fafhrd, he wanted to become a professional writer. Apparently at that time Leiber had no such ambitions. But the ideas gripped him, he kept thinking about them, and eventually was so possessed by them that he decided to write a story. Fischer was an avid reader and involved in fandom in some way, which I think means he was reading and possibly contributing to some of the very cheaply-produced fanzines of the time. They were printed on plain paper, more like pamphlets than magazines, with no real publisher (I think), just a bunch of dedicated fans willing to volunteer to make them, print them up, and distribute them.

Here's some info about such a publication called The Silver Eel (it's the name of a tavern where the twain liked to hang out in Lankhmar):

• The Silver Eel @ ISFDB

There were articles, essays, maybe stories, all written by amateurs, and illustrations also done by amateurs (unless one of the fans happened to be a pro and willing to donate work for free I assume). In the contents I see an essay by Fischer called The Mouser and the Game, as well as some interior artwork by his wife Martha. I now see several contributors are professionals—there's Karl Edward Wagner and Gene Day, and an interview with Leiber. I searched but couldn't find a copy of this for sale anywhere. I'm not sure if those are the contents of one issue or several, possibly all of them? No clue (I see now, it was a one-shot publication). But it seems to be something that was produced much later, after Leiber was already a famous author. There were other fanzines that I believe Fischer was contributing to much earlier.

My assumption is that the game being referred to (in Harry Fischer's essay) is the Lankhmar board game Fischer and Leiber created, which apparently was a forerunner of war games like those published by TSR. Many decades after creating the orignal board game they licensed a version of it to be produced and released by TSR. That version, like other TSR games, used small square printed paper pieces on a simple folding paper board (no fancy thick cardboard or anything). I bought the game many years ago, no idea what happened to it. But I seem to recall their original version had something like carved wooden pieces, made by Lieber and Fischer? The memory is a bit hazy though, I could be wrong. I also seem to recall reading that the game brought in a lot of money for both of them, at a time when Leiber was living in abject poverty in a small and very dingy apartment, writing on a manual typewriter that he placed on a board over the kitchen sink.

Lakhmar; the original game

I manged to find a PDF of a wargaming magazine called Dragon with an article about the game, as Leiber and Fischer created it. I was hoping for pics, but nope:

• Lankhmar; the original game and what it became

Scroll down to page 32 to see the article. Here's the first (relevant) paragraph, describing the game board they made:

The original LAHKMAR board was about five feet long and two and a half feet wide. It was constructed from several layers of corrugated paper and was colored according to type of terrain. It was three- dimensional, in that the land was one layer above the water, and the steppes were one layer above the surrounding lands. The Sinking Land was a separate block of paper that could be removed every ten turns and replaced after the same interval. (A simpler solution than having a space beneath into which it could sink below sea level!)​

Note it says Lakhmar, not Lankhmar (the n is missing). That's not a mistake, it's what it was called at the time, before any of the stories had been published. Whoever wrote the article doesn't seem to quite understand what the Sinking Land is—I'll explain real quick—

The Sinking Land (not to be confused with the Sunken Land, which is the name of a story) is a piece of land that joins two ithsmuses (ithsmi?) so you can ride across, as long as it's up. It rises and sinks at regular intervals, giving just about enough time to make it across on a fast horse before it sinks again. It's described as a shield-shaped platform of rock—concave on the underside, and somehow air bubbles or rising gas from the sea floor graudally fills it until it rises to the surface. After some time it begins to rock from side to side, shedding gas pressure from underneath, until it loses bouyancy and sinks to the depths, then hours later the gas pressure fills it once again and it rises anew.

In LAHKMAR the pieces were corks. Those of the heroes had a diameter equal to the side of the square; the others were the next smaller size cork. (Not being sure of the exact size of the squares, I can’t be more specific.) The corks were colored to distinguish their affiliation. The weapons were pins, toothpicks or anything that could easily be stuck into a cork.
​

Oh wow—ok, so not exactly carved wood, but more elaborate than squares of somewhat thick printed paper. The original board had a square grid rather than the hexagon grid that became standard in board games later. And this game was heavily instrumental in the creation of Dungeons and Dragons, which mentions it in the manual right near the beginning apparently. I don't think any board games that were war games existed at the time.

Leiber's influence on my own work

I mean beyond just the autobiographical thing.

I used to play around with some wildly over-the-top Shakespearean language in the fun lighthearted way Leiber did, in some of my just-messing-around stories and in several parts of Passing Strange. Actually there though I was more inspired by Dante, because a huge part of Passing Strange is a journey through hell, and I used the Inferno as my model (loosely). I had vague ideas about Dante but had never read him, so I hit up wikipedia and found a nice long article that described some of the torments of the damned. Even just on wikipedia the language was powerful and poetic, and I let it influence my writing. I could get away with it because it was a postmodern comedy, and I said something directly at one point about the Dante influence that occasionally crept in. And I definitely used the Dante influence in a very Leiber-inspired way, almost a spoof of how he wrote.

And it suddenly hit me last night—I have one character who's tall with broad shoulders and another one who's compact and wiry but a tough street fighter. But that's from real life, it's an accurate description of my friends. Still though, it's likely I was unconsciously influenced to emphasize those aspects of them.

That's all I can come up with at the moment, but I'm sure there's more. Leiber was a titanic influence on me as a writer, but probably a lot of it is unconscious. As I think of more throughout the rest of the thread I'll come in and update this post. Or maybe it's better to add supplementary posts so people will see them, rather than sneaking it all in back here. We'll see what I come up with.

Notes from Chapter one: Lovecraftian Period

This is in my own words, and I've finally reached the first actual chapter in Witches of the Mind. It's difficult going, because I have to read those incredibly tiny words, ponder on them, and then reword what's written. And often I have to go back and check things, which means scanning over those microscopic letters again. I've found I can do it with just my reading glasses on, which is much less taxing on my eyes than that magnifying glass—perhaps better termed a distorting glass. Every time I move it I get sea-sick. But here it is:

Lieber stated in the foreword to The Book of Fritz Leiber that Lovecraft was the chiefest influence on his literary development since Shakespeare. Byfield (the author of Witches of the Mind) says the comment seems puzzling, because little direct influence can really be seen. He believes Lovecraft gave Leiber confidence and practical advice when he really needed them, as well as helping him figure out structure. All of this helped him make his first sales to the pulps. Leiber's close studies into Lovecraft's work helped him realize the possibilities of symbolism in fantasy, which may be the most important thing he learned from him. In the mid 40's Leiber faced a personal crisis he was able to resolve thanks to what he had learned from Lovecraft, and it helped him figure out his own methods of symbolism.

Leiber had read The Colour Out of Space, and it depressed and frightened him. He avoided Lovecraft after that, until a college friend loaned him some tear sheets (pages torn from magazines) of some of the other stories. Leiber was unable to remember who that friend was, but Harry Otto Fischer relates in The Mouser and the Game that it was Franklin W MacKnight, who also introduced the two of them to each other. At that point Leiber liked Lovecraft's work much more. He also started reading Charles Fort with skepticism but fascination, and says in Terror, Mystery, Wonder that he approached them "Warily at first, but then with increasing abandon as I realized how they meshed with my own life." The stories avoided religion and moralizing, and often were about lonely intellectuals probing into the unknown. I can't tell if this is about Lovecraft's stories or Fort's. Must be Lovecraft, because then it says Leiber read voraciously for two days, favoring The Moon Bog over all the rest, which in Lovecraft in my Life he claims showed unsound judgement, but it was because he was so excited by the material. He read Lovecraft aloud to his wife Jonquil and talked enthusiastically to Fischer about him. This was during the first few weeks of their marriage.

At this time he already had several half-finished novels written, including a lost world story set in Yucatan and a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novel with the same setting as I, Claudius (by Robert Graves) as well as from The Tale of the Grain Ships.* Later, in the Sixties, he would rework that one into the beginning of The Swords of Lankhmar, the only novel featuring the twain.

It was at this point that his wife wrote to Lovecraft in an effort to make a helpful contact in the writing world. This is extremely interesting, considering a later story he would write called Conjure Wife, the premise of which is that the professors in a small college are all highly rational men whose success is mainly due to their wives' spells and hexes, unknown to them. Similar to what I said in an earlier post about Arthur Machen, the men represent rationality and the women the irrational unconscious and magic. Jonquil discovered Lovecraft's contact information in some magazine's letter section and wrote to him. Lovecraft replied on November 2, 1936, and invited her to have her husband and Harry Fischer write him. Their correspondence would be rather short-lived but intense, and filled with activity. By March 15 of the following year Lovecraft was deceased. He called Leiber one of his "Star correspondents." And apparently Leiber had managed to connect, however briefly, with a mentor. Exactly the one who could help him the most it would seem.

* This is messing with my head, because I assume I, Claudius is set in Rome, while The Grain Ships is set in Tyre. Every so often Byfield says things that make me scratch my head. Maybe he just meant that Grain Ships and Swords of Lankhmar have the same setting (or had, until he relocated Swords to Lankhmar). Sigh...

Leiber accepted Lovecraft's commentary on his poetry without question, but when it came to the prose he was far more skeptical. In Adept's Gambit (originally called The Tale of the Grain Ships) he adopted only his corrections of diction and historical detail. In his letter Lovecraft urged Leiber to explain the antagonist's motives more explicitly, but finally Leiber decided to leave them vague. Having already been schooled by the Elizabethan dramatists (indirectly, and posthumously of course), Leiber seems not to have cared much for Lovecraft as a stylist. He even directly stated that he was the better writer in an interview with Paul Walker.

"Lovecraft's greatest influence seems to have been philosophical," Byfield says. ​

Lovecraft believed that to evoke the sense of dread he was after required absolute consistency of structure and mood, and as much attention to detail "As if one were preparing a hoax" (quoted from Lovecraft). Leiber applied this advice to his own work, and he uses his fiction to express his views even more than Lovecraft did. For the first decade of his writing, Leiber used story structures very similar to Lovecraft's many times, and when he didn't he was apparently deliberately working against his master's techniques.

Byfield says Leiber has always been a slow writer, and so his development was rather slow as well. This connects up with something I read by Lieber's son Justin, probably in the magazine article I linked to recently (Fritz Leiber and Eyes), that he would rarely write more than 500 words a day. Perhaps because he was concentrating so much on his artistic wording (my own conjecture). Though I don't think he generally used the same Shakespearean word trickery in other stories that he did in the Lankhmar stories. But still he was very careful with his wording, as was just detailed above. He was especially slow by pulp standards, taking three months at his best speed to write ninety thousand words. He wasn't able to live on his writing alone in the 40s. His son Justin had been born in 1938, which increased the need for money and decreased his available time for writing. He wrote self-help books, became a speech instructor, and after deciding the war effort was probably more important in this instance than his belief in conscientious objection, he took a job as a parts inspector at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. In 1944 he became an associate editor at Science Digest in Chicago.

Major Technical Breakthrough

I have found a much better way to read this book without killing my eyes (they're hurting right now). Take a high def picture, blow it up, and read it on the monitor.

That is all.

Leiber's Influence on Me, Part the Second

It's that fabled attention to detail that he either got from Lovecraft or already had when they crossed paths. Frequently Leiber will go into deeper detail about certain things than most writers will. It's partly a way of inserting those memorable details that make writing really sparkle, but it's also a way of relating characters or things to each other spatially, or explaining precisely how something works. I should see if I can find some examples.

I definitley took this from the Lankhmar tales and used it extensively in many of my Tony & Kurt stories (stoner dudes) and also in Passing Strange. I don't think I've done it so far in The Beastseekers or Season of the Witch. Or maybe I've just reduced it a bit so it doesn't stand out so much anymore? Or possibly it's just become so endemic to my approach that I'm no longer aware of it? I should see if I can find any examples in my recent work. I probably used it more in those earlier stories where I was just playing around, same as I used to go into flights of Leiberesque Shakespearean wording.

Here's an example from In the Witch's Tent:

“The hag bent over the brazier. Its upward-seeking gray fumes interwove with strands of her downward-dangling, tangled black hair. Its glow showed her face to be as dark, jagged-featured, and dirty as the new-dug root-clump of a blackapple tree.”
​

It's also an example of Leiber piling on the adjectives and adverbs, frequently in clusters. That's one of those things we're told as beginners not to do, but it's also an example of a master's techniques looking an awful lot like beginner's mistakes, the difference being the master knows exactly what he's doing and uses them for a specific purpose. It's definitely something he took from Shakespeare and other early writers, and he's using it to create that archaic flavor and the playful way with words. But I want to find a specific kind of example. Let me look for a bit.

Here, just a little later in the same story (I guess it's the next paragraph actually):

“Such of them (fumes from her brazier—Xoic) as escaped her greedy lungs tortuously found their way to the tent's saggy roof, resting on seven ribs down-curving from the central pole, and deposited on the ancient rawhide their tiny dole of resin and soot. It is said that such a tent, boiled out after decades or preferably centuries of use, yields a nauseous liquid which gives a man strange and dangerous visions.”​

In particular the seven downward-curving tent ribs. This is a lot of detail, especially in such a brief story, but it's important that readers understand the tent has these ribs holding it open like a hoop skirt, because that's important later. Otherwise, when the twain do that crazy thing they do, the tent would just collapse. Of course, he's also doing other things at the same time. I love the way he relates the ancient resin-soaked hide of the tent to the witch's wrinkled skin, both as black and crusty as hard Mingol bacon. So evocative. It's as if she's a tent, and her old bones the poles, or as if they're inside a living tent that's also a witch. Like those cartoons where you're inside a whale and can see the ribs.

Oh, what I just did is another thing I got from him. That last sentence was extremely economical but got the idea across. He does that a lot in between the in-depth descriptions. I could have used a lot more words to explain about the inside of the whale (many people would I think), but I found a very condensed way that got the info across clearly enough. It seems like most writers keep things in between these two extremes, to a particular level of detail that's become standardized. It's almost a cliche in most writing. He expands the palette in both directions to great effect.

The Poetic and the Esoteric

Another thing about the first quote in the previous post that I just noticed. I returned here after reading some of my Poetry thread, and now I see this is poetic as hell! So many poetic devices. Of course Leiber was also a poet—that Poor Little Ape thing he recited at the end of the video (top of second page) about did me in. I'm not sure all of it did, but I remember getting that punched-in-the-gut feeling on parts of it. Powerful stuff. It's in a few of his books, including Strange Wonders, which I have on order.

And yet one more thing—not only is there a sense in which it's like they're inside of the witch (the tent being analogous to her or like a witch itself), but it's a witch soaked through with decades' worth of psychedelic resin-fumes known to bring "Strange and dangerous visions." And she's saturated with it too, from a lifetime of inhaling and absorbing it through her skin. Visionary experience right there. No wonder she can forsee things. I forget if they started having weird dreamlike forebodings themselves, but that's what I would do if I were writing it. No wonder I like Leiber so much.

He said somewhere that as he got older his interests shifted from science to math to psychology to philosophy and religion (from the strictly material toward the purely symbolic/esoteric), and elsewhere he said he later took a great liking to astrology and the tarot. Of course he would—he understands symbolism, and that's exactly what those things are. Esoteric, mystic symbolism and the psychology of the unconscious. Jung and his associate Marie-Louise Von Franz discovered all kinds of psychological significance in such ancient Hermetic systems as well as alchemy, folk and fairy tales, mythology, the Arthurian legends etc.

I also realized this morning, thinking about Stardock as a symbol of the White Goddess, that not only is the mountain presented as a woman, but she's an ice queen—vast, powerful, foreboding, covered with ice and snow, and I'm not sure but I seem to recall she was also made of very pale stone almost the color of snow. The very embodiment of the White Goddess.

He's capable of really packing in layers of symbolism, and it's effortless or at least seems that way. This is how symbolism works in dreams—a symbol can carry multitudes of meanings, even if some contradict others. Contradiction doesn't matter, because the unconscious doesn't use either/or logic. That's the conscious mind that does that. The unconscious refuses to recognize opposites as such. Day/night, male/female, up/down can coexist with no problems in dreams. It's only when you wake up and the conscious mind takes over that you rebel against these juxtapositions.

Two New Arrivals

The book Fafhrd and Me came in, as well as the fairly thick little paper pamphlet called The Riverside Quarterly (July 1970), containing an essay of his called Utopia for Poets and Witches.

The book includes a followup to the original Fahrd and Me speech, written a dozen years later. I've now read his essays Monsters and Monster Lovers and The Anima Archetype in Science Fantasy, both extremely erudite and well-researched. He quoted many times directly from some of Jung's books and made some astonishing statements about what monsters symbolize (at times it's a person who marches to his own drum and makes the social masses nervous, prompting them to their pitchforks and torches).

It seems to me that when Leiber reads a story he examines it with his exceptionally philosophical mind, but he expands out farther than I ever have. He doesn't just look at act structure, character arc, or inciting incident, he looks at—

• What are the philosophical ideas contained within this story,
• What kinds of human emotions is it aimed at evoking, and
• How do those two things relate?
• What is the proportioning of the various elements in the story?
• And what elements are present? (Flip these last two)

It also seems, from these essays, that he is deeply familiar with how to approach various genres. I mean exactly what elements go into them and how. This is the kind of stuff found in Truby's recent genre book, but quite likely with a different outlook and some different conclusions. I suspect Leiber wrote to Lovecraft about some of this. I really wish Leiber's letters were available for reading, as Lovecraft's are in the Writers of the Dark book. I wish Leiber had written a book or essays about how he approached some of this. And maybe he did? I want to try to find all of his essays that are available (within reason) and re-read Writers of the Dark.

Oh damn! Lookie here—

• Fritz Leiber Papers @ University of Houston Libraries Special Collections

There's a dropdown menu with a section of letters, from and to him. It doesn't have Lovecraft listed though. How I wish I could get access to those papers!! Apparently you can, but it sounds like you need to be a 'researcher', which I assume means you need to be engaged in an official project, like writing a book. I seriously doubt they'd let some dude just stroll in and go all through them, or that my blog would count as research. Plus you need to arrange for permission from whomever holds the copyrights. Not sure if that's in advance or afterwards. Maybe I should write the book?

Here's some information about Jonquil Leiber and her letters to Lovecraft, featuring excerpts from some of them as well as from her husband and Lovecraft about her:

• Her Letters To Lovecraft: Jonquil Leiber

Spotlight on Harry Otto Fischer

It's time to look into Harry Otto Fischer for a while. After all, it was he who created Fafhrd and the Mouser, and on whom the Mouser was based. In the followup essay to Fafhrd and Me (in the book of the same name) Leiber related that Harry had wanted to be a writer before that desire overtook himself, and that Harry probably would have done the requisite studies and practice, except that it was the Depression and the need for money drove him to a very practical job making and designing carboard boxes at a factory in Louisville Kentucky. That job apparently took up a great deal of his time, and left him not enough to pursue becoming a writer, which allowed his friend Fritz to leap ahead of him at that venerable avocation, and to actually become the chronicler of brave Fafhrd and the wiley Mouser.

Fischer has written several essays, which I'm going to attempt to track down here. This is my first score:

• The Dragon Magazine, September 1978

If one were to scroll down to page 28, one might discover a little feature titled The Childhood and Youth of the Gray Mouser, penned by mister Fischer himself.

Here's part of an intro by the editor of Dragon:

Last year, at GenCon X, Fritz and Harry were Guests of Honor. They gave a couple of seminars, and it was during one of them that this story was finally committed to by Harry. He had said, in answer to a question from the audience, that the only thing about the whole series that he didn't particularly care for was Fritz's version of the Mouser's boyhood in The Unholy Grail (I don't care much for it myself—X). Now you must understand that it was Harry who helped Fritz in creating all of the wonderful main characters on Nehwon, way-back-when (actually he created the main twain all by his lonesome—Xoic the Xcribe). Being the gracious gentleman that he is, Fritz told Harry to write his own version. Harry replied that he had started one some time ago. Right after the seminar was over, I immediately offered to print it if ever he chose to finish it.
​

And part of a second intro by Leiber:

This account by Harry Fischer throws a remarkable light on the early years of the Gray Mouser. It is very persuasive and of an almost incontestable authenticity, deriving perhaps from some secret memoir of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. It establishes the Mouser as city and alley being from infancy and inextricably linked to Lankhmar. Was he born there? Most likely, though the possibility remains that he traveled as babe in slave-caravan from some city to the south or east — Tovylis, say, or Sarheenmar — or from some still farther bourn. But city creature from the start he surely was.
​

I'm very glad this archive of Dragon Magazine exists. This is the second time I've linked to an issue of it. I wonder what other treasures lie in wait there?

I've just noticed there's only one letter's difference between Heroes and Herpes. Does it mean anything? I hope not, though there may well be a close correlation (heroes being adventurers who bed lots of women). I decided to do a search for Twain-related-material in Dragon magazine (it was in reading about some of the articles that my eyes slightly malfunctioned and I thought one was about herpes). I'll list what turned up here:

• Fafhrd & The Mouser Say Their Say @ Dragon vol 1 #1 (pg 4)
• The Finzer Family — A Tale of Modern Magic @ Dragon vol 2 #2 (pg 8)
• Sea Magic @ Dragon vol 2 #5 (a complete story from The Knight & Knave of Swords) (pg 17)

It's nearly impossible to search their offerings. This is all that's turned up so far, and I'm done wading through fruitless search results. What a coup though, that last link! A complete Fafhrd and Mouser story. Unbelieveable how many of them can be found online.

I've read Sea Magic just now. This is a much more mature Leiber than in the earlier stories. There's a great deal more realism in the settings, the people, the goings-on in the various locations, and the interactions between characters. There was a bit much toward the beginning of bringing the reader up-to-date on what's happened, I believe because the story was printed first in a magazine or somewhere rather than in context sandwiched between the appropriate stories in the books (not at all sure about that). It'll be interesting to check and see if all of it remains in the version printed in Knight & Knave. It probably does—he often mixes strange stuff like that into even his best stories. Spoilers below by the way, if you haven't read the story.

I like the slow progression toward realizing Fafhrd has been enchanted, through an ever-growing annoyance at every distraction from his goal (following the mysterious woman), and that this is why he's been doing what he's been doing. And then (even more) the way the journey out across the sea becomes dreamlike stage by stage. Of course it does—we're journeying into his unconscious—where else does one's Anima dwell? She is that for him, which is why she exerts such an attraction and power. It also strikes me how many of his and the Mouser's women are some form of fish-human hybrid* (very mythological, but always presented in fascinating fashion, nothing as simple and dull as a mermaid who's woman from the waist up and fish the rest of the way down). And on the tail of this realization came the idea that of course—the sea has always been the greatest symbol of the unconscious. Where else would their Anima figures (some of them anyway) drift but in its depths (those that aren't projected out into the world of Nehwon as mountains or witches, or pehaps tentwiches)?

Another thing I notice—the more I read of his stories the more Leiberian my own writing becomes. This is a good thing, for I'm now toying with the idea of doing a little Fafhrd/Mouser freewriting or perhaps practice scenes. That seems the appropriate capping-stone to the final studies here on my blog—to emulate the Leibermeister himself.

* Not many exactly, only probably the two undersea princesses they court in While the Sea-King's Away. One of my favorites.

Influence, Part the Third

I remembered two particular things he does sometimes that I always enjoyed, both of which I've used in my own writing.

1)—Gradual Increase

In many of the stories of the Twain there's a gradual increase through a major part of the story. In one of the later stories set on Rime Isle (so in one of the last two books) the Mouser is in charge of a ship (I think it's called a galley?) carrying an extremely valuable cargo of lumber and many other vital products needed badly on Rime Isle (which has almost no trees—they get their wood from sea-wrack that washes ashore after a shipwreck). He has premonitions of some impending disaster, and, being a cruel and domineering captain, he drives his crew to securely double-lash the entire load. When they've done that (and are complaining about how hard he works them) he demands they triple-lash it, and cover all the lumber with a thick tarpaulin that he makes them caulk down all along the edges to make it absolutely water-tight. Actually it goes on longer than it sounds—through much of the story he keeps making them secure it more tightly, until it seems stronger than the ship itself. Meanwhile his lover Cif, back on Rime Isle, has had a premonition that he's in great danger, and she begins sending some kind of spells his way to strengthen him and charm him against disaster. I'll just say that disaster indeed strikes, and when it does it's a very good thing that all the strengthening and charming has been done, to both ship and Mouser. The entire ship is capsized and pulled way down under the waves, but thanks to the amazing job his crew has done on the deck, it's as airtight as a submarine, and rises again because it's got a trapped air bubble inside. Should I have writ that much?

At any rate, similar things happen in other stories too. You do recognize that this is yet another gradual increase, but they're never formulaic or predictable. I've used this idea in something once, and I don't even remember what it was. Some totally unfinished story I can't even think of the name of. Oh no, it just occurred to me—actually it was a very major project called Rock Garden way back when. It was also done in The Lord of the Rings, where Sauron kept growing stronger and his armies increased continually.​

2)—Characters thinking (but we're not privy to it)

This one I used in a version of The Beastseekers on my Workshop thread. It's the second attempt—when I decided to try it in third person. I had Cody trying to figure out how to cook chili in a campfire. He looked at the problem for a while, then took his fork and just pushed the cook pot some ways into the fire right on the ground. I think it gives a good impression of someone wrestling with a problem.​